On a rocky clifftop pinnacle high above Southern California’s Catalina Island, two newborn eaglets began to spar for nest dominance Friday morning.

A short time later, they were passed out, tucked safely into a cup-shaped “crib” beneath the mother bald eagle, her white-hooded head rotating as her yellow eyes scanned the horizon for danger.

There is work left to do. A third and final egg remains to be hatched.

Welcome to this week’s hot Internet reality show.

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“There’s a whole soap opera going on up there,” said wildlife ecologist Peter Sharpe of the Institute for Wildlife Studies.

Tens of thousands of viewers from around the world have tuned in to watch the real-life spectacle unfold, giving office workers, schoolchildren and stay-at-home moms a rare glimpse into a seldom seen part of nature.

The fascination? “Seeing close up something that most people will probably never see, a bald eagle,” Sharpe said. Though they are fierce-looking birds — they scavenge as much as they hunt, feasting on carcasses including road kill — the bald eagle presents another side when it comes to nurturing its young.

“Probably most people consider them to be dangerous killers, but they’re able to see (here) how gentle they can be, how they bunch up their feet as they walk around the nest so their talons don’t wound ... and how they feed these little 90-gram chicks,” Sharpe said.

But as entertaining as it all is, there’s a scientific mission playing out in this nest that is perched some 300 feet high on the northwest end of Catalina.

Resident bald eagles in the Channel Islands off the coast of California disappeared by the early 1960s as a result of DDT pollution that had entered the local waters’ food chain.

In 1980, the Institute for Wildlife Studies, based in Arcata, Calif., launched an effort to restore the bald eagle population on the West Coast.

Since they began with about 20 bald eagles, including five breeding pairs, biologists have hatched more than 200 eaglets since 1987. In the beginning, the eggs were taken from the nests and “fostered” in incubators, then returned.

In 2007, a milestone was reached in the study when the first eggs hatched naturally in the nests, which are monitored by tiny, 24-hour webcams so scientists can watch remotely.

There are nearly 20 breeding pairs in the Channel Islands today, with the eagles now part of the natural population on four out of the eight islands. A fifth — San Clemente — possibly will be added this year.

“I really didn’t think we were going to be at this point 10 years ago,” said Sharpe, who has been working on the project since 1997, when he was still working on his doctorate degree. “The fact that most of the eggs are hatching on their own is really optimistic. The population is slowly growing and spreading out.”

Mortality rates, however, are high, with only about 50 percent of the eaglets — which are tagged with leg bands, wing markers and radio transmitters — surviving to the end of the year, Sharpe said.

“They go out on their own, they’re scavengers, so they can get hit by cars, electrocuted on power lines,” he said. “The ones that stay on the islands have a pretty high survival rate once they’re past two or three months. “

In what has become something of a springtime Internet ritual, several live cameras are operating from eagles’ nests scattered throughout the islands, but the nest on the west end of Catalina — a second nest is at Two Harbors — managed to draw in especially large numbers of viewers, thanks to the co-sponsorship and promotions this year of The Pet Collective, a year-old YouTube-based organization known for its many popular puppy and kitten cams.

“The eagle cam offers something different to people, I think because it feels like this is such an exotic animal,” said Michelle Davis, executive producer for The Pet Collective in Los Angeles. “We all have songbirds in our backyards, but most of us never see a bald eagle. ... This gives everyone a bird’s-eye view of what’s going on.”

Some schools have adopted the nests, Davis said.

Probably the highlight came for those audiences who saw the actual hatching of the first two eggs.

“You should have seen us, everyone was cheering and screaming,” Davis said.

Two eggs are the norm, Sharpe said, but the same breeding pair — nicknamed by webcam fans as Wray and Superman — produced three offspring last year as well. None of those, he said, survived.

One was found dead on the island, one was never seen later — “They tend to go into the water, a lot of them probably drown,” Sharpe said — and a third was found dead in Canada.

Ravens plucked the eggs out of a nest on Santa Cruz Island several days ago, he said, after the nest had been disturbed and the parents finally left.

But the fish are plentiful this year, Sharpe said, which bodes well for the eaglets at Catalina.

The bad news for employers everywhere? There will be plenty to watch over the next few weeks as the eaglets continue to battle it out for a pecking order and eventually begin to stand and walk around the nest on their own.

“Just since we’ve been talking about it (at The Pet Collective), viewership has grown by 30 percent,” said John Singh of the collective’s communications department.

The numbers predictably jump, he said, as the work day both begins and ends.

The eagle cam also is embedded on the Daily Breeze homepage at dailybreeze.com

A few things to look for on the live eagle cam from the northwestern end of Catalina Island:

Feedings for the eaglets over the next two weeks will be hourly or more often. The mother eagle remains sitting on the nest most of the time, with the male bringing back fish and other food. The female will join the search for food when the babies are old enough to be left on their own, after about four weeks.

The major predators for eaglets this age are gulls and ravens.

If you notice the chicks fighting with each other, don’t worry. It’s all part of how they establish a “pecking order.” The eaglets usually are fed in the order in which they were born. Scientists don’t know the sex of the eaglets yet.

The nests, made of sticks and grass, often last decades (the one on the west Catalina eagle cam existed as far back as the 1920s based on some historic photographs). They can be 4-8 feet across in size.

A female adult bald eagle weighs between 12 and 14 pounds and has close to a 7-foot wing span. Males are somewhat smaller. The can breed annually throughout their life span, which is about 30 years.

The eaglets will become more mobile (using their “shins”) at around 2-3 weeks, then will begin to stand and walk around 4-5 weeks.

At about 8 weeks, scientists will bring the eaglets down to band their legs and put blue wing markers on them so they will be able to track their whereabouts.

They leave the nest at about 11-12 weeks.

Coloring of juvenile bald eagles is a mix of brown and white, with the full white head plumage developing once the bird reaches sexual maturity at about 5 years.